Given that there have been no takers, perhaps HP should post this little nugget on eBay and see what offers come in. As long as they set the reserve at whatever tax loss value may still reside with keeping WebOS et al., any higher bid should be considered a gain.

I hunted down a pile of Commodore and Atari 8-bit systems in order to teach LOGO and BASIC programming to my two sons. The languages are immediate and responsive with a direct response to user input in a way far long lost in 'modern' development environments like Visual Studio 2010. The clear syntax of these two languages gives a child an easy path to comprehension that one command like: LEFT 34 makes something happen on the screen that you can immediately view.

The old "Hello World" sample application can be completed in 2 or less lines long in these languages. C++, C#, F#, VB.NET, etc... all fail to deliver such an accessible learning path, and that is why they fail to surpass 25+ year-old systems.

I believe that this approach has been a success. This year my eldest asked for the Flash development environment for Christmas...

Don't worry about the FBI. What you should be concerned about is Google, which by my estimation is really just a business front for the NSA in its quest to 'know all'. Think about it: Google will happily and for free store or provide you services for:

- Email (gmail)
- Videos (YouTube)
- Files (Google Drive or whatever its called now)
- Audio communications (Google Voice)
- Photos (Picasa Web Albums)
- Friendship communications (Orkut and Buzz)
- Personal documents like spreadsheets, etc (Open Office)
- etc etc.

Of course one of the fine print actions that Google 'will do for you' is to mine the contents of whatever you entrust to them. They say that they are looking for information in order to create metadata in order to advertise to you, but no doubt they also are looking for activities, intentions and content that is either a threat (terrorism), subversive (damn commies) or illegal (child porn, etc.)

You might not think that 'Do no evil' Google is really the bad NSA, but this is similar to how they've operated in the past when they want to accomplish something very public in a non public manner. Recall their deal with Howard Huges in the 1970s to recover a soviet sub from the bottom of the ocean under the guise of operating a new mineral mining method.

If you look at the reported income for Google this is also suspicious. These revenue numbers are HUGE and when you evaluate it there needs to be a LOT of people clicking on paid ads or purchasing Google search appliances, etc. My own research indicates that the majority of people I've asked don't click the ads that often, leading the question of where is this nation of ad-clickers anyways? Perhaps it is just a way to launder, er feed money into an organization that is of immense intelligence value but simply doesn't have a true revenue model that provides the income that they claim.

I'd love to be wrong, so please show me how I could be so fooled by my suspicions.

Back in 2004 Microsoft paid me $850 for my copy of Office 97 Professional because it was shipped to me on floppy and by 2004 the software would no longer install, calling me a thief.

It turned out that the floppy version had a lock built in to it that would kick in after a certain number of installs and by 2004 Microsoft no longer shipped software in floppy format.

I checked out the printed Software License and it made no mention of this install limit or the lock mechanism. Microsoft offered to ship me a replacement CD, but the notebook I was using this on had no CD ROM drive. At this point I demanded a full refund and Microsoft paid me that $850 in exchange for Disk 1 and the Software License.

No court needed. :)

We would only build new coal generation if we choose to.

In the same way that governments ran after nuclear power in the mid 20th Century, governments of today must choose to pursue clean, reliable and safe energy sources like geothermal and deliberately shut down and dismantle our toxic collection of nuclear power stations.

Nuclear power was the best idea of the last century but we now know of so many better and cheaper ways to safely generate stable and reliable power that to continue to pursue the old idea of nuclear energy is foolish. That toxic technology has killed thousands, rendered vast areas of Europe with toxic levels of radioactivity and has burdened thousands of future generations with the obligation of securing and maintaining the waste created by this idea whose time has passed.

The sooner that our governments move our energy production to safer and more reliable systems like geothermal, the better. Building up an entirely new and stable energy system based upon the vast heat resource under our feet would boost our economy out of the recession we are in while improving our security and safety through the complete dismantling of the toxic legacy of nuclear power generation.

IT is a critical part of our society and the Help Desk is like first responders (fire, police, ambulance) for other emergencies. I work for the City of Calgary and have wondered if an IT crest-emblazoned collared shirt similar to police or fire would be helpful. I'm not sure, but a crest with a logo / coat of arms that isn't tacky that is put together in a pseudo-military style shirt could look nice, however, given the general tendency towards pear-shaped employees in IT, this may not come off too well...and I can hear it now 'Here come the muffin-tops!'

I hate the fact that there is SO much intermediation between the keyboard and the actual machine in our current computing environment (when it comes to teaching the fundamentals of computer programming). I doubt that our programming models will ever actually return to the intimate connection to hardware of the 80s, which is fine, but when it comes to teaching the fundamentals of the interaction between the instructions and the actual machine / chips there is a lot less between you and the machine when developing in an 8-bit world. A single wrong character can bring the whole system to a halt, or cause really unexpected behaviours that are often not seen in our compiled / checked / verified modern programming environments. There is also a lot less help from the system in developing, so if you do take to it, it is because you enjoy the challenge despite the obsticles and clear limitations of 20-year-old hardware.

I've built up a 'lab' with old Atari, and Commodore 8-bit machines. My son is learning Atari and Commodore Basic and Atari LOGO. For Christmas he wrote a Christmas greeting in Atari LOGO, which really required him to dig in to recursion and integrating the application's behaviour in to an internal mental model, so I'd call this approach a success.

I find it interesting to see the comments on PYGAME here...I'll have to investigate as eventually I'll want him to move to the next level where he is using 'modern' languages once he groks the basics and wants to do something that he can share with his peers via email.